Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023 with Not for Sale!, their campaign of ten demands for decommodified housing in c\a\n\a\d\a. The following is an extended description of one of these demands and proposal made up of an activist strategy, a plan for implementation, and an architectural project.

1. Land Back

 We demand land back. Indigenous people in c\a\n\a\d\a have been dispossessed of land. The poor quality of housing on reserve, and the homelessness that many urban Indigenous people suffer from is a direct result of their inability to connect to their natural and cultural homelands. To repair this violence, we demand that all land c\a\n\a\d\a claims for the “crown” be returned to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples in co-ownership trust with either Federal or Provincial or Municipal governments.

For Indigenous people home is land. Home is not the walls of a physical house, but people’s physical, cultural, emotional and spiritual relationships with the land. These relationships that form one’s home, are found on the land. All land in c\a\n\a\d\a is Indigenous land, so this capitalist nation-state is built on stolen land. This theft was initiated in by Europeans through both abstract decrees like the Doctrine of Discovery and Royal proclamations, and individual settlers’ physical acts of homesteading. The process was structured through legislation in the nineteenth century, most importantly the Indian Act, which left Indigenous people legally, culturally, ecologically, and existentially landless and homeless. This process of land dispossession enriched settlers, creating their intergenerational wealth, while enacting an Indigenous genocide. Yet, the theft of Indigenous land has not only alienated Indigenous people, but settlers as well. All beings in this territory are alienated from the land, because healthy and empowering housing cannot be built on stolen land. The most important step addressing the deplorable housing conditions produced by these land policies is the return of land to Indigenous people.

We demand that all public lands claimed by the “crown” and controlled by all levels of government–municipal, provincial and federal–be governed jointly by the Indigenous Nations (First Nations, Inuit and Metis) in whose territory the land resides and the government of c\a\n\a\d\a as a “co-ownership trust.” This arrangement would benefit Indigenous Peoples, settlers and immigrants, by allowing access for Indigenous people to the land, privileging sustainable relations with non-human natural world, and making better use of the precious resources of the land. This would be a radical departure from existing processes of consultation, which are non-binding and allocate Indigenous Nations little or nothing of the substantial revenues that private companies reap from extraction on their territories, obstruct First People’s use of these lands, and devastate their fragile ecologies.

Examples of what this might look like are starting to appear—such as with a “nature agreement” between British Columbia’s First Nations and the provincial and federal governments to formally preserve and protect land, species, and biodiversity in the province through Indigenous leadership. In another, the B.C. government formally recognizes Haida ownership of the lands of Haida Gwaii in April 2024. Both show how land back can be achieved.

Land Back calls for a complete rethinking of both land relations and the housing system in c\a\n\a\d\a. Only a true restoration of Indigenous land values, creating what the Nisga’a call the common bowl–to which everyone contributes and from which everyone can be fed–can create a real home for all people. This requires educating everyone about the violence of colonialism and its land dispossession, its destruction of non-commodified understandings of home, and the power of a non-acquisitive and cooperative relationship to land as a foundation for equitable housing system. As a pilot project, we have created many maps of territory as a means toward this end, helping everyone to envision with two-eyed seeing (indigenous lens with one eye and the other eye, a western lens) what such a transformation at the scale of territory could look like.

Land Back Contributors:

Region: Vancouver

Activist: Xalek/Sekyu Siyam Chief Ian Campbell, (Sk–wx–wú7mesh Úxwumixw, Squamish Nation)

Advocate: Sarah Silva (Squamish Nation), Hiyam Housing

Architect: Sim’oogit Saa-Bax Patrick R. Stewart (Nisga’a Nation), Krystel Clark (Montreal Lake Cree Nation), Alexander Moses, Kara Crabb, Patrick R. Stewart Architect